On the general market, commodity selling prices are set by sellers or intermediaries in expectation of certain profit margins. This is true both for selling commodities at real shops and through communication networks such as the Internet. The pricing system is on a one-way basis from the side of sellers or intermediaries to consumers (purchasers), and therefore, if a commodity is too expensive for customers, they refrain from buying the commodity, or they buy the commodity from another source selling the same commodity at a lower price, or they buy a cheaper, similar commodity.
In order to encourage consumers to buy more commodities, business models have recently been proposed, in which a purchaser of a particular commodity (including service) sets a price for the commodity, and purchases the commodity from any seller willing to sell the commodity for that price. Among them, U.S. Pat. No. 5,794,207 is well known as a so-called “reverse auction” patent.
Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application (PUPA) No. 11-353361 discloses a commodity sales system according to which an intermediary exhibits a commodity on a communication network, and receives arbitrary bids for the commodity from intending purchasers for a prescribed period. After the period has expired, based on the bidding results, the intermediary presents one or more sellers with a weighted mean price obtained by averaging bidding prices equal to or higher than a prescribed reference price, using the number of their bids as a weight, and with a desired purchase quantity corresponding to the number of bids. After a seller willing to sell the desired quantity of the commodities at the weighted mean price becomes entitled to sell, the intermediary collects the bidding price for each of the commodities from the purchasers who bid at a price greater than or equal to the reference price. The intermediary receives a prescribed percentage of the collected money as a fee, and the seller receives the remainder.
A system which allows a purchaser to set a price may afford greater satisfaction compared to conventional one-way pricing methods, but a reverse auction as disclosed in the above U.S. patent aims at individual sales, and therefore, price reduction cannot be expected as in mass-market sales. In the invention disclosed in the PUPA noted above, since purchasers who bid lower than the reference price are disqualified, there is no essential merit of scale for the seller or the intermediary. Furthermore, since the intermediary negotiates with a plurality of sellers or commodity suppliers after the bidding is closed, and decides who is to be an actual supplier, it takes time until the business deal with the purchaser is settled, and, in some cases, the commodities cannot be sold after all due to unsuccessful negotiations with the suppliers. Thus, the intermediary could hardly maximize profit.